Presidential campaigns are supposed to be the greatest show in American politics — infused with big ideas and historical import. Yet after 16 months enduring a Republican primary and then a two-man contest so far defined by gaffes, cynicism, knife-fights and rapid-fire news cycles, even the best political reporters want the whole thing over with.

Yet another high-profile veteran campaign correspondent had his Howard Beale moment this week — mad as hell (or rather, sad as hell) and not willing to take it anymore — when Mark Leibovich lamented the devastating “joylessness” of the 2012 grind and wondered what the hell he was doing with his life.

“How am I ever going to get through it?” the chief national correspondent of The New York Times Magazine asked.

But his cri de coeur is just the latest primal scream in a campaign that is sending a whole generation of journalists to the confessional.

“This is worse than normal, a lot less fun, and it feels impossible for us to change the conversation,” Walter Shapiro, who has covered nine presidential campaigns and now writes for Yahoo News and Columbia Journalism Review, told POLITICO.

“People are feeling grateful that it’s almost over,” added Maggie Haberman, who covered the 2008 election for the New York Post and is covering the 2012 election for POLITICO. “There has been this ongoing lack of enthusiasm. Neither side seems to be enjoying this race — not the Democrats or the Republicans, and not the reporters.”

If there is one narrative to anchor what often feels like a plotless 2012 campaign, it is media disillusionment. Reporters feel like both campaigns have decided to run out the clock with limited press avails, distractions, and negative attacks, rather than run confident campaigns with bold policy platforms or lofty notions of hope and change — leaving the media with little to do but grind along covering the latest shallow, sensational item of the day.

“Until the candidates restore joy, it’s impossible for us to be joyful,” NBC News senior White House correspondent Chuck Todd told POLITICO. “The campaigns are trying so hard to manipulate us, to work the refs, to withhold access. If these candidates were comfortable, the campaign might be joyful to cover.”

“This is one big market-tested campaign, with no unknown candidate who could really blow it up, or be something different,” Leibovich said. “If the last campaign was the change campaign, this is the no-change campaign.”

When Haberman and her colleague, Alex Burns, wrote one of the first jeremiads in June, there was no shortage of self-criticism: “The endless news cycle, infused with partisanship thanks to cable news and coupled with the Internet-age imperative to produce faster, more provocative copy, has amplified every cynical and self-indulgent impulse of the political press — POLITICO included,” they wrote.

But betweenJune and September, amid the insufferable heat and the dog days of August, self-criticism turned to self-loathing. Self-loathing because somehow, for all the space allowed by print, the airtime allowed by 24-hour cable news, and the limitless real estate of the Internet, the media could not find a way to elevate the discussion and focus on what the 2012 campaign is actually supposed to be about: jobs, the economy and so on.

“The fact is, we are under-covering the economy, we are under-covering — but you cover the campaign that is in front of you,” Todd, who frequently voices his 2012 frustrations on his MSNBC show, “Daily Rundown,” told conservative radio show host Laura Ingraham in August.

“The watercooler discussion begins with ‘Can you believe that guy?,’ not ‘Will Romney or Obama give me a lower marginal tax rate in 2014?’ So the campaigns and the ideological press keep churning it out for a hungry public,” Time magazine’s Michael Scherer wrote that same month.

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz, The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, and Shapiro all wrote their own versions of the “Worst Campaign Ever” story. Shapiro’s actually bore that headline, verbatim.

Leibovich’s piece brings the self-loathing to its apotheosis: “The treadmill existence of having to file articles around the clock, tweet nonevents as they happen and listen to the same canned speeches and campaign conference calls day after day, waiting for something, anything, to bust up the script so that you can pretend there’s news here; this can be the definition of joylessness,” he wrote.

Of course, Leibovich and other journalists could choose not to cover the gaffes and the attacks — but because the campaigns have cordoned off the candidates and failed to launch a substantive discussion, attacks and gaffes seem to be the only newsworthy items of the cycle, which only reinforces the campaigns’ desire to keep their candidate cordoned off.

“There’s no off-Broadway anymore,” CNN’s Gloria Borger, who has been covering politics for 35 years, told POLITICO. “There is a sense among the candidates — and their staffs — that nothing is off the record. And while I think we can idealize the way it used to be in the good old days, this new, high-speed news cycle has had one result none of us likes: a constant barrage of scripted sound bites and talking points, just to make sure everyone is on message, all the time.”

Because of the pace established by Twitter and the Internet, the latest “gotcha” moment snowballs faster than ever. For a reporter pressed to be ahead of the cycle, assuming conscientious-objector status would be suicide. Once one credible journalist takes the bait, everyone takes the bait.

“We’re all part of the same stew, and you can see the glee in the press corps when they know they’ve found today’s ‘Gotcha,’ moment,” Leibovich said. “The arms race should and has to end at some point.”

But… how?

Some reporters believe it is just a matter of waiting out 2012 in hopes that 2016 will see the return of 2008-level excitement. Four years from now brings promise of fresher faces like Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Martin O’Malley or Andrew Cuomo; some old favorite like Hillary Clinton; or some unknown who can restore a greater sense of enthusiasm.

Others fear that with every election cycle, campaigns are further battening down the hatches, setting precedents of media control that ultimately render the media powerless to do anything but wait at the mercy of a scripted quote, like dogs waiting for scraps.

John Harris, editor-in-chief of POLITICO, suggests another approach.

“It seems to me that one thing journalists need to remember is that they are people who command great respect within the profession. They have the authority to write what they’ve written, but they underestimate their ability to help elevate and infuse things with some purpose,” Harris told POLITICO. “People want reporters to cover this like they’re doing something important with their lives.”

“Yes, we have to live in the moment. But we also want to finish a campaign and not just see an endless stack of clips, or tweets. We want to see our work and be able to say: ‘that was good, that showed originality,’” he continued. “And we shouldn’t be beating ourselves up, knocking the hell out of ourselves. We should have some fun.”

In other words, if that’s all there is, keep dancing. Break out the booze. Have a ball.